But as American families, business owners, and struggling entrepreneurs now brace for their “fair share” punishment, many of Obama’s wealthiest friends are busy evading the tax hikes their candidate spearheaded. Let’s ring in the new year exposing the hypocrites.

1/3 update: The New York Times reports that Al Gore sold his ailing Current TV network to terror-coddling al Jazeera because he had wanted to unload it by December 31 for tax reasons:

Al Jazeera did not disclose the purchase price, but people with direct knowledge of the deal pegged it at around $500 million, indicating a $100 million payout for Mr. Gore, who owned 20 percent of Current. Mr. Gore and his partners were eager to complete the deal by Dec. 31, lest it be subject to higher tax rates that took effect on Jan. 1, according to several people who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. But the deal was not signed until Wednesday.

A spokesman for Al Jazeera said that antitrust regulators had not expressed any objections to the deal.

Awww. So poor AlGore didn’t make it in time. But as I report below, plenty of other Obama tax evaders did.

President Obama will kick off the new year the same way that he kicked off the old year: by demanding that the wealthy pay their “fair share” in taxes. But while millions of small business owners, struggling entrepreneurs, inventors, and investors brace for a double whammy of fiscal cliff tax hikes and new Obamacare taxes, the class warrior-in-chief’s richest pals are getting a pass.

It’s a Golden Pass for liberal millionaires and billionaires who support higher Obama taxes for everyone but themselves. Meet the Democratic tax evaders of the year.

*GOOGLE. The left-wing Internet giant provided Silicon Valley’s biggest campaign finance boost to Obama, with individual employee donations supporting the tax-hiking candidate by a ratio of more than 31-to-one. Google rank-and-file workers pitched in some $800,000 to Obama. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Chief Legal Officer and Senior Vice President David Drummond, and Google vice president and chief Internet evangelist Vint Cerf are all vocal Obama supporters and top donors.

In December, Google’s Netherlands subsidiary disclosed in a tax filing that it had shifted nearly $10 billion in revenues to a Bermuda shell company. That’s “almost double the total from three years before,” according to Bloomberg News. In response to criticism, Google defended the scheme as a legal response to government incentives. “It’s called capitalism,” Schmidt snarked defiantly.

Wonder what all of Obama’s operatives and media lapdogs who bashed evil, selfish Republican offshore tax havens have to say about that? Cue crickets chirping.

*The Washington Post. Speaking of media lapdogs, this newspaper sanctimoniously supported Obama for president and singled out his support for “revenue [tax] increases.” Its endorsement editorial castigated Mitt Romney for embracing an America “in which an ever-greater share of the nation’s wealth resides with the nation’s wealthy, at a time when inequality already is growing.”

The privileged wealthy barons at the Washington Post, however, increased that inequality at the end of the year when they joined a growing number of companies who are paying 2013 dividends in 2012 to protect investors from paying higher Obama taxes on dividend income. It’s “proof positive,” my friend and guest-blogger Doug Powers noted, “that no matter what happens in the negotiations, the country is definitely going off the irony cliff.”

Bonus irony: The $70 million year-end dividend payment will be a windfall for other “higher taxes for thee, but not for me” Obama supporters, including donor Warren Buffet’s firm Berkshire Hathaway. According to the Associated Press, “Berkshire is its largest shareholder with an estimated 1.7 million shares, which means it could
get a roughly $17 million dividend payment.”

*Facebook. The social networking giant’s founder Mark Zuckerberg told Obama in 2011 at a town hall forum that he was “cool” with paying higher taxes. But neither Zuckerberg nor his many Facebook execs are actually down with following through. Co-founder Eduardo Saverin renounced his American citizenship in a blindingly obvious bid to evade nearly $70 million in taxes. In addition, Zuckerberg and a half-dozen Facebook insiders are all skirting hefty estate and gift taxes on their family Facebook shares held in annuity trusts. According to the Wall Street Journal the legal maneuver is called a “grantor-retained annuity trust, or GRAT,” and the total Facebook tax avoidance sum adds up to at least $200 million. A “cool” $200 million, that is.

*George Lucas. The billionaire Star Wars director called Obama a “hero” and parroted his candidate’s capitalism-bashing rhetoric in a January 2012 interview with PBS dinosaur Charlie Rose. “I do not believe that the rich should be able to buy the government,” Lucas lectured. He does, however, believe in shirking higher taxes the one-percenter way. In October, Lucas sold his film company to Disney for a whopping $4 billion in cash and stock to evade anticipated capital gains tax increases and Obamacare Medicare surtaxes on investment income.

Dre boosted the careers of prominent Obama hip-hop cheerleaders Eminem and 50 Cent. But overseas, he’s rolling like a Romney supporter. The rap mogul is now using a County Cork, Ireland, tax haven to protect his global headphones empire subsidiaries and avoid high U.S. corporate tax rates. The Irish Examiner newspaper explained that the elaborate structuring “allows for money to be [channeled] between the separate companies in the form of royalty payments or [license] fees to artificially but legitimately reduce profits as a means of reducing tax liabilities.”

To paraphrase Dre and his Obama-endorsing rap partner Snoop Dogg, it ain’t nuthin’ but an E thang: Elitism. Exemptions. Evasion.